Transcript
This episode contains discussion of suicide and graphic descriptions of violence that may be disturbing to some audiences. Listener discretion is advised.
It’s late afternoon on December 6th, 1989 and scores of students shuffle from the cold Canadian winter into École Polytechnique, an engineering school affiliated with the University of Montreal. It’s near the end of the semester, and students are preparing for finals, turning in their last papers and delivering final presentations, eager to enjoy the coming holiday.
On the building’s second floor, a few dozen final year mechanical engineering students have been sitting in a large classroom for more than two hours listening to one another’s presentations. As a student sits by a projector presenting on heat transfer to the class, an unknown young man wearing blue jeans and a heavy winter jacket calmly walks into the room.
Most don’t immediately notice the long object he’s holding in his hands as he walks up beside the presenting student. “Alright everyone, stop everything!” the man shouts, seizing the class’s attention. The students glance around in a mix of confusion and bemusement. Some even whisper or giggle to each other, thinking it must be some sort of joke.
The man then makes clear the object he’s holding – a semi-automatic hunting rifle he’d bought a few weeks earlier at a sporting goods store. He fires a shot into the ceiling, and yells “Girls to the left, guys to the right.”
Still, nobody moves. So he yells his order again more forcefully. This time, the students start to comply. In the melee, several scamper in the wrong direction and the gunman redirects them…men by the exit, women to the back.
Finally, about 50 men have reassembled to one side, and nine women to the other. The gunmen then instructs, “Guys get out. Girls, stay there.”
As the men shuffle out confused, the gunman admonishes them to “move your asses!” Still unsure what to make of the situation, this jab leaves some students clinging to the idea that this is all just an elaborate end-of-semester prank. It’s still a decade before Columbine kicks off an era of painfully routine school shootings, and a man with a gun in a classroom is not yet an immediate, visceral source of terror. Surely, the rifle only contains blanks, some of the men think as they walk out. The gunman even seemed to crack a smile.
Others conclude that it is a serious situation – maybe a robbery or a hostage situation. That could explain why the men and women were separated – perhaps for long-term holding purposes. But as the men leave the room, several are surprised to see no other gunmen outside.
After the last male student leaves, there’s a long silence in the classroom. Then the gunman asks the women “Are you wondering why you’re here?”
In response, one of the women asks who he is. His answer erodes any last hope that this is a joke. “I fight feminism,” he replies. “You’re all a bunch of feminists, and I hate feminists!”
23-year-old Nathalie Provost protests, saying that they’re not feminists and that they’ve never fought against men. “We’re just women studying engineering,” she says. “We’re only women in engineering who want to live a normal life.”
The man doesn’t even take a second to consider her words. He immediately opens fire, emptying the 30-round magazine on the nine women, methodically striking them each down one by one, left to right, in a matter of seconds. Before leaving the classroom, he writes the word ‘shit’ on one of the students’ projects.
He exits the classroom, moving through the hallways and firing on anyone else he encounters. He enters another classroom, takes aim at one of the women and squeezes the trigger twice, but he finds he’s out of ammo. After leaving to reload, he attempts to re-enter, but the door has been locked. After firing three shots at the handle and still failing to get in, he moves down the corridor continuing his rampage on the second floor, wounding several more and killing a financial services employee.
He then moves down to the first-floor cafeteria, where more than a hundred people are dining. He fatally shoots a nursing student as the crowd scatters in terror. He makes his way to a storage area where he finds two young women sheltering themselves, and summarily executes them both. On his way out, he spots a man and woman together under a table and instructs them to get up, but he allows them to leave unharmed.
Finally, he makes his way back up to the third floor, shooting and wounding several more en route. He enters a classroom with more engineering students, who have so far remained oblivious to the massacre unfolding below them. Three students are giving a presentation on an elevated stage, and as the gunman walks toward them, he again yells for the men to get out. But this time, he doesn’t wait. He immediately shoots Maryse LeClair, the one woman on stage, then turns around and opens fire on the front row of students. As others rush toward the door, he fatally picks off two more, then turns back to the classroom tables, where several have sought cover. One by one, he shoots four of the remaining women.
He then returns to the stage, where LeClair is still lying, moaning and begging for help. He pulls out a knife, and stabs her several times, bringing her cries to an end.
By now, someone has pulled the fire alarm, and police sirens are wailing outside. The massacre is over, and there’s just one thing left to do. 25-year-old Marc Lepine, now the deadliest mass murderer in Canadian history, takes off his coat, wraps it around the barrel of the gun, and mutters “oh shit” as he shoots himself in the head. His 20-minute rampage left 14 dead – all women – and another 14 wounded.
But they wouldn’t be his last victims. Many of those who’d managed to escape Lepine that day would go on to endure survivor’s guilt, post-traumatic stress and debilitating depression. Before this type of mass shooting became horrifically common, there weren’t yet many resources or support groups that could help survivors cope in the aftermath of such an event.
At least two students would later die by suicide after leaving notes that cited the massacre as the main source of their distress. In turn, both parents of one of those students would die by suicide themselves, unable to handle the loss of their only child. Other students would go on with life, but not the one they had envisioned. Some couldn’t bear to set foot in the school again and dropped out…ending their engineering dreams before they could ever began.
Outside the university was a nation in shock. Canada had never seen a rampage like this before—particularly one motivated by such naked misogyny. Still, many wrang their hands and sought answers as to why someone would do this, despite the fact that Lepine had left little mystery about his motives.
In addition to exclusively killing women and telling his victims to their faces that he was acting in a fight against feminism, Lepine also left a three-page suicide note in his pocket. He explained that he was acting not for economic reasons, but for political ones, and that he had decided to quote, “send the feminists, who have always ruined my life, to their maker.”
He went on to rail against women for getting benefits like maternity leave while also now seizing men’s advantages. He blamed women for the preceding seven years of his life that had been joyless, seeming to tacitly blame them for his rejection from the Army and his academic failures. The note ended with a list of 19 prominent female journalists, TV personalities and union leaders Lepine deemed “radical feminists” that that he would have killed if he’d had more time.
It was later learned from family and acquaintances that Lepine was deeply resentful that women were moving more and more into traditionally male-dominated careers, like engineering, and taking what he regarded as men’s rightful positions in schools and the military. He himself had twice been rejected from École Polytechnique—so choosing that as a target appeared to be one part revenge and one part to find female engineering students he regarded as de facto feminists who’d taken seats from men.
In reality, blaming women for these failures made no sense. Lepine had not been rejected from the university because women had taken his place. He just hadn’t completed the prerequisite courses needed to enroll. And his rejection from the military? He said himself in his suicide note that it was because he was deemed to have “anti-social traits.” Go figure.
Lepine’s disdain for feminists, and likely women more broadly, may have gone much deeper. Of course, trying to psychologically analyze someone posthumously is fraught. But in the aftermath of the massacre, it was widely reported that Lepine had had an abusive father who exposed him to misogyny and a low regard for women, including his mother, from a very young age. He’d also had a very strained relationship with his sister, who would reportedly ridicule him relentlessly and publicly. As a teenager, he would fantasize about her death and once even dug a mock grave for her and placed her photo at its head.
Lepine did, however, long for a romantic relationship with a woman, according to family members. But he was never successful—in fact, he didn’t really even have female friends. Women who’d known him said he had no idea how to act around them. He was extremely shy and uncomfortable with women—something made worse by self-consciousness over his chronic acne. He would apparently try to overcompensate for this by being bossy with women and trying to show off his computer skills. Some recounted that he was actually very nice to them initially, but if they indicated they weren’t interested romantically, he would immediately harden and withdraw completely. Sometimes, he would even get mad.
There was also a wider societal backdrop preceding Lepine’s anti-feminist rampage. Over the previous two decades, feminist causes like protections against domestic abuse and sexual harassment, as well as greater reproductive, property and employment rights, had made strides in Canada. Women were gaining more autonomy and showing up in greater numbers to careers traditionally dominated by men. Women’s rights movements only became more vocal in the 1980s as the country took a conservative turn politically. But voices uncomfortable with, and outright hostile to, feminist gains also became more vocal.
In what’s become a perennial response around the world when women make gains, some political and religious figures lamented the erosion of the traditional family, and pined back to a time when women dutifully devoted themselves first and foremost to the roles of wife, mother and home caretaker. Some voices further warned that feminist movements were going too far and demanding solutions to non-existent problems. But the Montreal Massacre was very inconvenient to those voices.
In many lone wolf atrocities, the perpetrator’s motives are murky. But this was not one of those cases. Lepine explicitly stated that he was targeting women, and that his goals were political—by very definition, an act of anti-feminist terrorism. It also gave a sensationally vivid case study in violence against women, which in turn prompted many to highlight more common, everyday violence, domestic abuse and misogyny that women endured. And it gave an extreme illustration of the discrimination women faced when pursuing traditionally male fields. In this case, women who wanted to become engineers weren’t just discriminated against for it, they were straight up murdered.
However, much of the Canadian media went out of their way to downplay Lepine’s anti-feminist motives. Some reporters did so for perhaps understandable reasons, like trying to avoid encouraging misogynistic copycats. But others were clearly just uncomfortable, or worse, with the attack’s implications.
Speaking with Canada’s Global News in 2019, former Toronto Star reporter Shelley Page looked back at her own coverage of the event.
[News clip]: “We were sent out to try to find out why the murderer would have done this, what must have happened in his childhood or background that made him commit and act of violence. You do what you’re told but at the same time there was no reflection on would we cover the violence against women angle, because that seemed beside the point.”
Shelley said she and many other journalists subtly changed the meaning of the tragedy into one the whole public could get behind without controversy – one that didn’t include the voices of quote “angry feminists.” It wasn’t that anyone explicitly told her how to frame the story, she’d just been conditioned in a male-dominated newsroom to know what sorts of hot-button landmines she should step around.
Writing in the Ottawa Citizen in 2014, Shelley said: “I fear I sanitized the event of its feminist anger and then infantilized and diminished the victims, turning them from elite engineering students who’d fought for a place among men, into teddy-bear loving daughters, sisters and girlfriends… They weren’t killed for being daughters or girlfriends, but because they were capable women in a male-dominated field. I should have written that then.”
But some journalists went further than simply sidestepping feminist angles. The day after the massacre, Canada’s most watched television program, The Journal, continued its coverage, led by one of the most well-known and respected journalists in the country, Barbara Frum. But that night while interviewing a panel of guests, she took an uncharacteristically leading and rambling line of questioning, taking great pains to undermine the idea that the massacre was an attack against women.
[News clip]: “Susan Hyde, hi June and Michael Kaufman have both uh, this is an act against women. Isn’t our common humanity diminished by any such multiple murder, any such monstrous crime? Why do we diminish it by suggesting it was just an act against one group? Isn’t against all our humanity… What I am sort of puzzled by is I heard so many women all day say ,‘This has happened because our society permits violence against women.’ Look at the outrage in the country, where’s the permission to do this against women? But isn’t the crime the brutality? It’s against this particular group this time, it could have been against another group. Would we be having vigils for every group? If it was 14 men, would we be having vigils? Isn’t the violence the monstrosity here?”
There was however, one prominent person who spoke up for women in the immediate aftermath. Nathalie Provost, the student who had challenged Marc Lepine in that classroom where he began his rampage, was shot four times and left for dead. But she did survive. Speaking to a group of reporters from her hospital stretcher two days later, she implored young girls not to let this tragedy derail their dreams.
[News clip]: “I ask every girl in Quebec and everywhere in the world who wants to be an engineer to keep this idea in their mind, because engineering is a great profession.”
Though resistance to the idea that the Montreal Massacre was anti-feminist attack would endure, it would lessen over time and even give rise a new generation of feminists. For her part, Provost says she never thought of herself as a feminist before the attack – and had told the shooter as much. But afterwards, she wholeheartedly embraced the label and still remains a prominent activist.
In 1991, the Canadian Parliament officially established the Montreal Massacre’s anniversary of December 6th as the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women – a commemoration that occurs annually to this day.
But for some, Marc Lepine isn’t a source of disgust, but veneration, and December 6th isn’t a day for solemn remembrance – but for celebration of quote “Saint Marc Lepine Day.”
In the lead up to the 30th anniversary in 2019, a Montreal man began publishing blog posts praising Lepine, saying that December 6th should quote, “be a day when we remember the first counterattack against the feminazis’ war on men.”
These posts reportedly featured doctored photos of Lepine with an assault rifle in front of a group of women, as well as women who had been decapitated, among others. The man, who had previously been charged with making death threats against women years earlier, was convicted of fomenting hatred of women and given a 12-month prison sentence. But his case was only unusual in that it ultimately yielded police intervention and charges. He’s just one of at least thousands of men who have expressed admiration of Marc Lepine online. Decades after his rampage, he would re-emerge as a folk hero for many that identify as “involuntarily celibate,” or incels.
What began as a benign online support network in the mid-90s for those who had trouble finding romantic success, Inceldom would evolve into something much darker over the years. From it would sprout a violently misogynistic ideology that would radicalize many sexually frustrated men into an all-consuming hatred of women.
As this movement grew, Marc Lepine would come to be seen by many in retrospect as the first incel mass murderer. Unfortunately, he would be far from the last, on this episode of Manmade Catastrophes.
[Theme music]
The original concept of involuntarily celibacy was actually coined by a woman. Alana, who’s asked in media interviews that her last name not be used, was a Canadian undergrad in the early 90s who had never had a romantic partner. She oscillated between blaming her looks and blaming her ignorance of how the dating game was played…and she wasn’t entirely sure about her own sexuality to boot.
Eventually, at 24 years old, she began identifying as a bisexual and dated a woman – her first ever romantic experience. When they broke up a few months later, Alana began to look back at her experience and wanted to help others who had similar struggles. She toyed with a few possible names to label people in her situation: ‘late bloomer,’ ‘non-blooming,’ ‘perpetually single’ – and then eventually landed on ‘involuntarily celibate.’ In 1997, she started a simple website called Alana’s Involuntary Celibacy Project, which was intended as a support group, open and welcoming to anyone of any gender. At some point during those early years on the forum, “involuntarily celibate” was abbreviated to incel.
Now, before we go any further I want to make a distinction. Those who identify as incels encompass a wide range of people with disparate beliefs and attitudes toward women—some in fact are women themselves. At its core, ‘incel’ is simply a label for those who would like to have sex or romantic relationships, but for whatever reason, aren’t able to. There’s nothing inherently sinister about those who identify as incel.
Many male incels, in the beginning and still today, are good earnest people with no ill-will toward women—they just haven’t had much romantic luck with them. On the other hand, some male incels have very toxic, hateful and misogynistic attitudes towards women. To avoid conflating the former with the latter, I’ll be referring to the latter specifically as ‘misogynist incels’ throughout the episode.
Now back to Alana and her early incel forum. She’s recalled in interviews that this forum did have a male majority, and some of those men could occasionally spout harsh generalizations about women and come off as angry. But it was generally a friendly atmosphere where all genders traded stories, shared their feelings of loneliness and offered constructive advice. One pair who met on the site even got married.
But one of the site’s fundamental flaws was that once someone overcame their difficulties and began dating, they tended to graduate from the group, rather than stick around to mentor newer members and show that involuntarily celibacy wasn’t permanent. This applied to Alana herself, who gradually gained confidence, began having more consistent dating success, and drifted away from the group. Decades later, she would look back in horror at what her incel creation ultimately became. “It feels like someone being the scientist who figured out nuclear fission and then discovers it’s being used as a weapon for war,” she told The Guardian in 2018.
As internet access grew in the early 2000s, other Incel forums sprouted up – some less moderated than others. These forums began drifting further from being constructive and inclusive mutual support networks, and more toward destructive echo chambers for aggrieved men to trade thoughts on how women were the root of their frustrations.
While many incel grievances were imagined, there was little doubt that men – especially White men in industrialized countries without a college degree – were losing status and opportunity relative to the past. And the ranks of these aggrieved men were rapidly growing.
In the early 1970s, as the Women’s Liberation Movement was underway in many Western countries, a now little-remembered Men’s Liberation Movement also formed. This movement believed that traditional gender roles were limiting to everybody, including men. And it was actually supportive of, and complementary to feminism, believing that patriarchy harmed both genders.
As women were making gains toward equality, Men’s Liberation sought to free men from traditional stereotypes about manhood and masculinity, and it encouraged both genders to be more flexible about traditional roles. It wanted to dispense with the popular image of male success meaning dominance – whether it be over a woman as the sole breadwinner and protector in marriage, or over other men in social relations and career progression. It sought to end the stigma around men showing any weakness or letting out their emotions. It believed that men and women should be equal and both able to embrace their own individual strengths and weaknesses while determining their own unique lives without either gender being dominant.
In an alternate timeline, one might imagine this movement very slowly but surely progressing and changing attitudes in concert with women’s advancement, so their progress could be accepted and viewed as a win for everyone. But of course, that’s not what happened.
By the late-70s, a Men’s Rights Movement splintered off from Men’s Liberation. This movement focused on how social norms and laws around things like military conscription, divorce and child custody actually discriminated against men. And it was far more hostile to feminism.
Men’s rights activists were not, and are not, a homogenous group—and some who today identify as MRAs still do embody something closer to the original Men’s Liberation Movement principles. But it’s fair to say that many in the early splintered off Men’s Rights Movement saw women’s progress as coming at men’s expense. And as the economy soon took a big turn for the worse, it would prove to be an appealing ideology for many struggling men.
- [News reel 1]: “Good evening, the worst is apparently yet to come in the oil crisis. Thy United States and six other industrial giants are banding together in face of a new blow from the OPEC oil cartel.”
- [News reel 2:]: “Today’s OPEC increases are expected to drive the price of unleaded up to a national average 77 cents per gallon. Higher costs for transportation will in turn have a ripple effect throughout the economy, driving prices up in general.”
- [News reel 3]: “The nation is in its worst economic crisis in 50 years and no one knows when it will end. ‘You gotta cut back on the grocery bill quite a bit, cut down on the heat and clothing.’ ‘I’m getting married in July and I don’t even know if I’ve got a job.’ ‘I feel rotten but what can you do.’”
- [News reel 4]: “As we stand here, 11.3 million Americans cannot find the jobs they need to pay their bills and feed their families.”
In 1979, a global energy crisis precipitated a severe recession in many industrialized countries, which saw a huge pike in inflation and unemployment. Up to this point, it had still been possible for many men in the industrialized world with a high school education or less to get high-paying work in low-skilled labor – work that could provide for a home, car and an entire family.
But after the 1979 shock, manufacturing employment—which was heavily dominated by men—began to decline and it would never look back. Even after the recession dissipated a few years later, the number of these jobs continued a steady decline as automation and globalization rapidly eliminated or outsourced them. This hemorrhaging only accelerated in the early 2000s as China’s ascent to the World Trade Organization cemented its role as the world’s factory. At the same time, the information age was turbocharged by the internet, placing a greater and greater premium on knowledge work.
For the United States and other industrialized countries, service work predominantly done by women was much less affected by these developments. It’s much harder to outsource or automate jobs like waitress, maid or masseuse—professions heavily weighted toward women.
Furthermore, the market shift away from labor toward knowledge work also advantaged women, who overall tend to outperform men academically. In 1980, there was a perfect one-to-one ratio of women and men in universities. Today, there are three women enrolled for every two men—an imbalance that continues to grow.
By most measures of affluence and power, women still trail men substantially in absolute terms. But in relative terms, men have indeed lost significant ground. For instance, women still earn less than men on the whole, to the tune of about 84 cents on the dollar. But that’s up from 64 cents in 1980 – a rather astonishing gain that in large part owes to stagnating wages for working class men. As of 2019, women under 30 actually earned as much or more than their male counterparts in 22 out of 250 US metropolitan areas, including New York City and Washington, DC, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of Census Bureau data.
A perennial complaint on incel forums is that women have become too picky in their partners. Hypergamy, defined as a woman’s desire to match with a man who has a higher social and economic status than herself, is a frequent point of frustration, with many on these forums deriding women for having ever-increasing standards for mates as their own socioeconomic statuses improve.
One frequent refrain is the pseudoscientific claim that 80% of the women now pursue the top 20% of men—something made easier by the advent of dating apps. This leaves men who are insufficiently tall, attractive or wealthy hopeless in the sexual marketplace. According to this narrative, women used to be much more likely to settle for the men in that bottom 80% due to their need for the financial and physical security that a stable male partner brought. But feminism and advances in women’s economic and sexual autonomy have deprived these men of their birthright to sexual fulfillment.
Made up statistics and entitlement to women’s bodies aside, they aren’t entirely off the mark. As women have narrowed the wage gap, they have become less reliant on men. They’ve become more empowered to leave abusive or unfulfilling relationships, or forgo them in the first place. Women are marrying and having children later, or not at all. And a mix of better legal protections, better access to birth control, and declining stigmatization of sexuality have separated sex from procreation, and given women a much higher degree of sexual freedom than decades ago. In the developed world at least, a woman remaining single indefinitely and enjoying sex and romance on her own terms is more manageable than ever.
But for men like Marc Lepine and those who would later identify with misogynist Inceldom, these societal shifts came while traditional beliefs about masculinity and the definition of male success remained largely intact—and it left them feeling pushed aside and increasingly irrelevant. These men weren’t only losing their status as gatekeepers of women’s financial security, they also felt they were losing their ability to achieve financial security even for themselves. Women were encroaching on roles that had always been reserved for men. They were becoming financial breadwinners AND gaining even more control over that most precious of commodities: their sexuality.
This would eventually coalesce into one of the fundamental tenants of misogynist incel ideology: the idea that male privilege is a myth. In fact, it’s women who now hold the real power in society. Men who aren’t genetically gifted or wealthy live repressed under their thumb, increasingly relegated to societal irrelevance. Many would come to believe it was a situation that needed to be rectified, even through violence if necessary.
* * *
As Inceldom was still in its infancy in the early-2000s, there were other subcultures drawing in sexually frustrated men. Perhaps the most famous was pickup artists, or PUAs.
Gurus offering love-starved men techniques to seduce women date back to at least the 1960s, but the industry really began to gain steam in the 1990s. One of the early pioneers was Ross Jeffries, and admittedly unattractive man who taught men to lead women’s emotional responses through, among other things, neurolinguistic-programming techniques like language patterns, tone adjustments and embedded commands.
[Ross Jefferies clip]
In a 1992 episode of NBC’s Faith Daniels show, Jeffries appeared alongside Men’s Rights Activist Mel Feit and pro-feminist Bruce Weinstein. In this clip, the first voice is Weinstein, followed by Feit, and finally Jefferies.
[Faith Daniels clip]: “Weinstein: There is a power imbalance in society, but who wields the power? It is men who wield the power. I am here to say it is time for men to give up our power, our authority and our privilege because we have dominated women, we have dominated other men, we have dominated the planet for too long and it has got to stop.
Feit: Women want to hear that we’re jerks, that we have all the power. You know, the most important unspoken truth about men: we are very angry. A lot of us are very angry at women. And this is a good example showing why we’re angry. You’re not even listening. You don’t want to listen to what we have to say.
Daniels: But I’m afraid that they heard.
Feit: I don’t think they heard at all. And the reason men don’t communicate about their anger, we keep it secret, is because when we try to tell you why we’re angry, you respond with ridicule or disbelief or your own anger.
Jefferies: I’m not angry, I’m satisfied because I know how to manipulate women and get what I want. But let me say: his point is so preposterous. Get a shot of this audience. Every woman sitting here is sitting on more power than Con Edison pumps out in 10 years. You control the access to sex and that is an incredible amount of power.
Feit: The man asks and the woman says yes or no, she has the power and that makes a lot of men feel—you don’t know this but it’s the truth—a lot of men feel powerless and degraded and dehumanized by the sexual system whereby the man asks and the woman decides. We feel harassed every minute of every day of our lives and it’s time that you understand that.”
This exchange seems to illustrate some of the early common ground between Pickup Artists and Men’s Rights Activists. Jefferies and Feit were at odds with the pro-feminist guest throughout the show. They both displayed a very low regard for women and agreed that they hold all the power in the dating market. But their main source of disagreement with one another was that Jefferies accepted this situation and felt men simply had manipulate women to overcome this imbalance, whereas Feit just spouted off frustrated anger at women and regarded Jefferies’ tacit acceptance of their power as disgusting.
Feit seemed far more interested in knocking women off their supposed pedestal than winning them over, whereas Jefferies explained it, ever so eloquently: “I wanna put women on a pedestal so I can look up their skirt.”
In retrospect, it’s easy to see from this early interaction how short the leap might be from aspiring pickup artist to more explicit misogynist if the pickup techniques failed.
By the late 90s, Jefferies disciples started branching out on the early internet, starting email lists, discussion forums and blogs to trade pickup techniques. One person Jefferies heavily influenced was Erik von Markovik, an aspiring magician who went by the pickup alter ego ‘Mystery.’ In the late 90s and early 2000s, von Markovik developed his own brand of pickup artistry that he called the ‘Mystery Method’—a finely tuned playbook for manipulating social interactions with women step by step to build attraction, comfort and ultimately seduce them. Most of the steps in this process, taken on their own, seem fairly benign, like ‘peacocking’—which means to wear eye-catching clothing to attract attention and start conversations. Or approaching women with an opener, like asking for their opinion on some romantic dilemma. But some were more controversial, like giving them backhanded compliments to undermine their confidence.
[News clip]:
Reporter: “The ace in this deck of tricks is the neg, short for negative, which means, forget the compliment guys.
Mystery: It’s been three minutes but it feels like an hour.
Reporter: Instead try teasing her, even mocking her a little.
Mystery: Talking to you is like pulling teeth.”
Mystery’s method differed substantially from Jefferies’, but it was similar in that it essentially de-individualized women and reduced them to sexual targets to be conquered through prepackaged tactics.
In 2001, Mystery began running bootcamps, where he took average frustrated chumps, as they were called in pickup parlance, out to bars and coached them in how to pick up women. One of his first students was the writer Neil Strauss, who went on to befriend Mystery and become a major figure in the pick-up subculture himself. In 2005, Strauss published the seminal book on his journey titled The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists. The bestseller became regarded as the Bible for pickup artists and propelled the pickup industry into mainstream consciousness. It attracted perhaps millions of men to dabble in the techniques it chronicled, and Mystery parlayed his newfound fame into a VH1 reality show.
[Pickup Artist trailer]: “Last season on The Pickup Artist, a man named Mystery took eight lovable losers and turned them into Cassanovas.”
Inevitably though, the tactics touted by these master pickup artists failed to work for many of the men who tried them…especially as they became known to the masses. After a few years of widespread media coverage and legions of men at bars making clumsy negs and canned openers, women were wising up. For the so-called average frustrated chumps, pickup artistry became just another false promise—one that would only enflame growing resentments.
During this time in the early to mid-2000s, the emergence of social media and platforms like YouTube were beginning to connect these men like never before and give a megaphone to more extreme viewpoints. Then in 2008, the entire socioeconomic order of the Western world was upended.
In a fortuitous bit of coincidental, yet rather symbolic timing, as the final season of VH1’s The Pickup Artist was wrapping up, an economic shock began to unfold. Millions of men would join the ranks of the aggrieved, and many who’d harbored low-key misogyny would be radicalized into something much more sinister.
* * *
[News clips]:
- “Lehman Brothers is going bankrupt. Meanwhile, as market everywhere react, the bottom to America’s financial woes appear nowhere in site.”
- “The Nasdaq, everything and more has been completely wiped out.”
- “This could be most serious recession in decades, and that means life as most Americans know it is about to change, in some cases dramatically.”
In late 2008, the American subprime mortgage crisis unleashed the worst global financial crisis since the Great Depression. The stock market plummeted, people and businesses went bankrupt in droves, and millions lost their jobs. Once again, it was blue-collar men who bore the brunt of the losses. Between late 2007 and early 2009, men accounted for 78% of the job losses in the United States. Many of those men would never return to the workforce again…even after the recovery.
In the decade after the Financial Crisis, diagnoses of so-called “diseases of despair,” which include substance abuse, alcoholism and suicidal behaviors, rose by 68 percent among men. Suicidal thoughts and behaviors specifically among 18- to 34-year-old men shot up an astonishing 210 percent over the same period.
Perhaps not coincidentally, men were also having less sex and romantic success. A 2019 survey by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago found that in the decade after the financial crisis, the share of men aged 18-30 who reported having no sex in the past year nearly tripled from 10 percent to 28 percent. We’ll come back to that later.
As with many periods of severe socioeconomic hardship throughout history, scapegoating followed closely behind the mass loss of status and opportunity for men. The seeds were planted for far-right movements that would sprout over the following decade against immigrants, Jews, diversity, and yes, women.
A stew of antifeminist subcultures like Men’s Right’s activists, Pickup Artists and Incels began to coalesce online into what’s since been dubbed ‘the Manosphere,’ where their respective constituencies fed into one another and other extreme right-wing fringe groups. But the thing was, with these growing numbers, they were becoming less fringe and more ubiquitous—and even more radical.
Then in 2009, came the man who many would come to regard as the first modern incel terrorist.
[News clip]: “It appears the man who opened fire in a Pittsburg area health club may have had a general anger toward women. Officials say George Sodini walked into an all-female aerobics class Tuesday night and placed a duffel bag on the ground. After pausing a few minutes, he took at least two guns out of the bag and opened fire.”
George Sodini, a 48-year-old systems analyst at a law firm, had been planning an attack at the gym he was a member of for at least nine months. Apparently motivated by decades of romantic frustration, he entered a class of about 20 women, turned off the lights and opened fire, unleashing dozens of rounds. Twelve of the women were hit, three of whom were killed before Sodini turned the gun on himself.
Sodini left behind a trail of blog posts and videos that shed light on his frustrations, as well as a journal found in his bag at the crime scene, where he outlined his motives and thoughts from the previous year. As would become common with later misogynist incels, it contained racist invective about how Black men have their choice of the best young White women…promiscuous White women who could give every Black man his share for months at a time before moving on, according to Sodini.
He also complained that he hadn’t had a girlfriend since 1984 and no sex since 1990.
[Sodini journal]: “Who knows why. I am not ugly or too weird. I actually look good. I dress good, am clean-shaven, bathe, touch of cologne, yet 30 million women rejected me over an 18- or 25-year period. That is how I see it. 30 million is my rough guesstimate of how many desirable single women there are. A man needs a woman for confidence. He gets a boost on the job, with other men, and everywhere else when he knows inside he has someone to spend the night with and who is also a friend. This type of life I see is a closed world with me specifically and totally excluded. Every other guy does this successfully to a degree. Flying solo for many years is a destroyer.”
In one of his videos, Sodini gave a tour of his home – something he seemed to think would be important in finding a woman.
[Sodini]: “Speakers on each side are large, they double as end tables, ok, couch and chair, they match…the woman will really be impressed. To the right is my bedroom, looks pretty clean, I’m sure she’ll be impressed. Come over here there’s some reading material that we’re all familiar with.”
One of the books he points to is titled How to Date Young Women for Men over 35, by pickup guru R. Don Steele. In fact, eagle-eyed journalists would later find video footage showing Sodini in the audience at one of Steele’s seminars. According to a woman who’d helped with the seminar, Sodini was very quiet and didn’t seem to loosen up or become the least bit more confident over the course of the three-day event like most of the other men. He was, it seemed, a failed pickup artist.
Like Marc Lepine, George Sodini would later become a folk hero – and tragically, a blueprint – for misogynist incels. For a time, shooting up a group of women out of sexual frustration was referred to on incel forums as “going Sodini.” That was, until an even more influential incel mass murderer would later overshadow him.
In the years after the Global Financial Crisis, what would come to be known as the ‘alt-right’ began to emerge online in earnest. This referred to a loose collection of far-right, anti-establishment political ideologies, which included opposition to multiculturism, immigration, non-Christian religious identities and feminism – and often, all of the above.
One of the most violent early expressions of the intertwining of these ideologies came in 2011, when far-right extremist Anders Breivik launched two separate terror attacks on Oslo, Norway; the first of which was a car bombing in a government district that killed eight people, followed later in the day with a mass shooting on a nearby island hosting a youth summer camp, which killed an additional 69 people – mostly teenagers. It was the deadliest mass shooting by an individual in modern history.
About 90 minutes before his attack, Brevick emailed a manifesto over 1,500 pages long to more than a thousand recipients. It laid bare his European ethno-nationalist ideology, decrying how Marxists, liberal multiculturalists and political correctness had allowed for the Islamic colonization of Europe.
Most of the media coverage following the rampage focused on Breivik as a White supremacist and Islamophobe, which of course, he was. But there was far less discussion of one of the other motives he outlined: anti-feminism.
Part of his beef with women was that their quote “unnatural insistence” on equality, and going beyond traditional roles of wives and homemakers. This, he complained, resulted in lower birthrates, which contributed to what he considered an ongoing genocide of outsiders replacing White European Christians. You might recognize this as an iteration of the so-called “Great Replacement Theory.” For the same reason, he also railed against interracial relationships.
But his anti-feminist worldview went deeper than that, and his writings seemed to betray a very fragile masculinity. Politically correct feminist ideology was transforming a patriarchy into a matriarchy, he wrote, and it “intends to deny the intrinsic worth of native Christian European heterosexual males.” The “feminization of European culture,” he added, has been underway since the 1830s, and men have now been reduced to an “emasculated, touchy-feely subspecies.”
Breivik wrote explicitly about killing women, explaining that most “cultural Marxists and suicidal humanists” and some members of the military and police are female. But not to worry, he says, as they are “physically and mentally inferior,” so it shouldn’t be hard to fight them. He notes that if you’re unwilling or incapable of killing women due to chivalry, then you should probably steer clear of armed resistance movements and just consider creating yet another right-wing blog instead. He instructs potential followers that they must quote “embrace and familiarize yourselves with the concept of killing women, even very attractive women.”
Breivik didn’t quite fit the mold of an incel, in that he didn’t appear motivated by personal sexual frustration. He was all for being chivalrous and protective of women—at least White Christian women—if they played by the rules of the patriarchy. But he did hold beliefs that would later be frequently echoed in misogynist incel talking points. He lamented the detrimental effects of the quote “Sex and the City lifestyle,” women’s promiscuity, and the “erotic capital” they use to manipulate men. His disgust with interracial relationships would likewise be very recognizable in later misogynist incel manifestos. And while he maybe wasn’t exactly an incel himself, his violent anti-feminism would make him yet another folk hero to some among their ranks.
Over the next few years, the online Manosphere rapidly expanded, fueled by YouTube, Reddit and anonymous message boards like 4Chan – where extremist posts were rewarded with the most attention.
While the Manosphere would remain a very loose collective of disparate and often conflicting ideas, a somewhat unified anti-feminist ideology was beginning to emerge, which even had its own lexicon. For instance, the usage of Red Pill terminology came into widespread Manosphere use during this time, a nod to the 1999 film the Matrix, where the protagonist Neo is given the choice between continuing to live in delusion or having his mind unplugged from the simulated world.
[Matrix clip]: “This is your last chance. After this there is no turning back. You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. Remember, all I’m offering is the truth, nothing more.”
While there’s no single agreed upon definition, in Manosphere parlance, blue pill tends to allude to so-called ‘normies’ hold onto the mainstream delusion that we live in a patriarchy. Taking the red pill, on the other hand, means awakening to the reality that in fact, socially, economically and sexually, women hold the real power. And they often use it to oppress men.
Another concept that proliferated was an obsession with alpha males – aggressive, dominant men who are natural social leaders, embody masculinity, and have no trouble with women – men that incels either envy and try to emulate, or disdain…often both. Alphas would later come to overlap with ‘Chads’ – muscular, popular men who get all the girls – both the hyper-attractive ‘Stacys’ and the more average ‘Beckys’, as they would come to be known.
Related to this is the 80/20 principle, which posits that 80 percent of women—all the Stacys and Beckys—only desire the top 20 percent of men—AKA the Chads—and lavish them with sex and attention, while the remaining 80 percent of men are left to compete over the bottom 20 percent of women. For the men at the very bottom, the numbers just don’t add up, resulting in a proliferation of incels.
This sits aside a wide held misogynist incel worldview that may on its face seem contradictory. Misogynist incels hate women who won’t sleep with them, and also hate women for being promiscuous. In their imagination, women’s sexual freedom is the reason none are sleeping with them. They’re all taking turns sleeping with, or trying to sleep with, the highest status alpha males, who are hoarding all the sex. An average woman may settle for a beta male, or normie, at some point as she begins to age, but it’s most likely transactional. She wants children, the social network and status that marriage provides, or just economic subsidization. But she won’t respect this beta. She’ll probably just end up cheating on him, mistreating him or leaving him and taking his children and half his wealth with her. Or if she doesn’t settle for a beta, she’ll just age into spinsterhood, leaving the very bottom men mathematically destined to lifelong Inceldom.
As these men see it, in the good old days, women were limited in their number of sexual partners by social stigma and the threat of pregnancy. At the same time, a lack of economic opportunity and exit ramps from bad marriages essentially forced women into long-term monogamous relationships from a young age. Hence, women’s advancement has been a means of exploiting and atomizing men.
This line of thinking is often used on forums to promote policies that would regulate women’s sexual freedom, policies like state-enforced monogamy, criminalizing birth control, or even placing a sexual marketplace score on all men and women that relegates them to shacking up with those of the same score. Policies like these would guarantee every man the woman he’s entitled to.
Of course, plenty in the incel communities recognized these proposals as fanciful. Many felt they just had to accept their hopelessness. So they would stew in these communities with others who would only reinforce and amplify their hopelessness and pin the blame exclusively on women. Feminists became nothing but male-oppressing man-haters, and women more generally a monolithic group of shallow, vapid, selfish, irrational, conniving, evil sluts who only give the time of day to the most brutish jocks.
Eventually, one figure would become the ultimate folk hero to many of these men, the prototypical misogynist mass murderer and an explicitly cited inspiration to numerous subsequent killers. And he would help crystallize misogynistic Inceldom into the extremist ideology it ultimately became.
[Rodger car video]: “Hi, Elliot Rodger here. Well, this is my last video. It all has to come to this. Tomorrow is the day of retribution…the day in which I will have my revenge against humanity, against all of you.”
In the next episode, we’ll dive into the second and final part of our look at how Inceldom went from a constructive support network to racking up an unimaginable death toll. We’ll explore how a rapidly growing number of misogynist incels started taking their frustration and anger offline and perpetrated a succession of mass murders that left many people, and some governments, wondering whether it should be categorized as a terrorist ideology.
This episode was based on numerous sources. One of the most notable was the book Because They Were Women: The Montreal Massacre by Josée Boileau. For links to that and other sources, head to our website at manmadecatastrophes.com, where you can also see a transcript of this episode and see our full archive and other ways to listen. Thanks for subscribing, and see you soon for part 2 of the “Incel Massacres.”
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